Image: Trevor Nichols
The city of Kelowna will not put any pressure on Commissionaires to pay its jail guards more money
The City of Kelowna will not put any pressure on Commissionaires to pay its jail guards more money.
The city contracts the private security company to provide jail guards at the Kelowna RCMP detachment.
Those 17 guards are members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 338, who last week renewed their threat to strike, after negotiations between Commissionaires and the union broke down.
Lee Mossman, the president of CUPE local 338, has blasted Commissionaires for not paying its guards enough. Yesterday, he challenged the city of Kelowna to ensure the company pays its employees better.
Because the city is issuing the contract, Mossman said it has a responsibility to make sure things are being run fairly. The city doesn’t have a say in what its contractors pay their employees, but Mossman said it can “suggest” the company pays “respectable and appropriate” wages in its contract language.
Stuart Leatherdale, a human resources director with the City of Kelowna, says that isn’t going to happen.
“The whole purpose of a collective bargaining arrangement … is so that they arrive at a fair wage. I think that process works well … and there’s labour laws set up to govern collective bargaining to help make sure it’s a balance of power, and they can arrive at good wage settlements,” he said.
“I don’t think we need to add language to intervene in a fair, collective bargaining process.”
Before Kelowna contracted a private company to provide its jail guards, the city hired CUPE employees directly for the positions.
Commissionaires has been winning those contracts for more than 15 years, but before the company took over, Leatherdale says city jail guards were making $19.10 an hour.
Adjusting for inflation, those guards would be making about $26 an hour today.
Mossman says the jail guards employed by Commissionaires make about $16 an hour right now, which is significantly less than guards in similar cities like Kamloops, Penticton and Nanaimo.
“We are lagging far, far behind what those wages should be,” Mossman says.
Julie Powers, the director of client services and operations at Commissionaires BC, says Mossman’s complaints about unequal wages is “a comparison drawn by the union that is an oversimplification of a much more complicated labour relations issue.”
When asked to explain what those complications are, she said there are ongoing negotiations between “several parties” and that she’s “not really at liberty to disclose confidential information.”
Commissionaires is also in the process of asking the BC Labour Relations Board to classify the jail guards as an essential service, which would limit their jail guards’ ability to go on strike.
Mossman has pointed out what he considers the irony of calling the jail guards’ work essential, while refusing to pay them a “fair and reasonable” wage.
“If you’re telling the labour board that the duties of our members are so important that no one else can do them, why are you paying them almost minimum wage?” he asked.
Powers says Commissionaires is taking the step because it’s “a determination that needs to be ruled on in order for us all to move forward.”
The labour board hearing will take place Oct. 19.
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